The present invention relates generally to messaging systems and more particularly to integrating third-party programs with messaging systems.
Messaging systems allow users or participants to communicate with each other by exchanging messages in a chat session. However, participants of a chat session do not have to be people. For example, many messaging systems allow third-party programs to act as participants in a chat session. Third-party programs are automated programs that interact with other participants in a chat session. Third-party programs may operate accounts of the messaging system. Third-party programs may receive messages from participants and perform functions based on the received messages. Third-party programs may also be referred to as bots, official accounts, and software chat buddies.
A user may wish to invoke third-party programs as participants in a chat session to provide customized functions, such as, e.g., providing relevant news articles, providing supplemental content, playing a game, etc. Conventionally, a user seeking to invoke a third-party program as a participant in a chat session must locate the third-party program in an app store of the messaging system. Such a discovery process to locate the third-party program in the app store typically involves a search mechanism or traversal of a category tree. These conventional approaches for locating third-party programs are often inconvenient, difficult, and yield inaccurate results.